Shades of Grey

by Clea Simon

  ‘Dulce, you’ve had a hell of a week. Cut yourself some slack.’

  Dulcie snorted. This from the woman who’d just told her to be on her guard and call a lawyer?

  ‘I mean, in terms of your thesis. I guess I shouldn’t have asked. But, hey, maybe you are getting work done – on the back-burner, so to speak. Maybe your subconscious sees something in that old story that your conscious mind just hasn’t acknowledged yet.’

  ‘You mean, maybe I’m getting a message from beyond?’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far, Dulcie. One ghost is enough.’

  Dulcie looked down at the paper. Her nerves had resulted in some dark scribblings and one stylized dagger. Just what the cops would want to see. She ripped the page off the pad and crumpled it up. On the page below was a picture of a cat, drawn in her own hand, and it was smiling.

  ‘Mr Grey, if you are here still, please help me.’ She’d lit the sage finally, placing the fragrant fist-sized bundle of twigs in a cereal bowl, for lack of a better receptacle. ‘Mr Grey, are you here?’ Following her mother’s instructions, she walked around, fanning the smoke into various corners. ‘Mr Grey?’ With luck, the smoke alarm wouldn’t go off.

  There was no answer. Of course, when did a cat ever come when called? Still, maybe she hadn’t seen the spirit of her pet at all. Maybe she was losing it. With that thought, and for fear of the alarm, she doused the smoldering bundle in the sink and soon found herself lying on the sofa, eyes closed. What a day, and it wasn’t even noon. In an ideal world, she’d go back to sleep and wake up on Sunday, but the interrogation and the bad coffee wouldn’t let her relax that much. Maybe she should head back to Widener: the question of the ‘jealous spirit’ was nagging at her. Was that spirit the same as the retainer’s ghost? Were multiple spectres haunting the old castle? Or were they all simply manifestations of Hermetria’s own overheated brain? The girl was under a lot of stress. By the end of the first fragment, the castle was crumbling, the mad monk was hovering, and things looked pretty grim. At least she had two suitors. This thought reminded Dulcie that she hadn’t called Bruce. Maybe the day was salvageable yet.

  She didn’t really need more coffee; her stomach told her that. But she could use something that tasted the way coffee was supposed to – and the company of normal, living human beings – before she made that call. Plus, she could check out Nemo, see if the little fish had returned to normal. But as she was entering the coffee-house, her cell rang. Bruce. Maybe she was psychic.

  ‘Oh, hey, Dulcie. Glad I got you.’ The big guy sounded flustered. She told him she’d been meaning to call him back, but she couldn’t tell if he believed her. ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you since that party. I still can’t get over you showing up.’ Not the opener she’d expected, and she excused herself for a moment to order a tall iced. ‘That crowd can be pretty insular.’ He laughed, but his humor quickly faded. ‘What am I saying? They can be a bunch of awful snobs. I know it, and I think it’s worse for girls. I mean, women.’

  He was trying; Dulcie had to give him that. And if one of his goals was to set himself apart from his cliquish crew, he was succeeding. ‘I was sort of surprised to be invited,’ she admitted as the barista brought over the frosted pint glass. ‘I guess Alana felt comfortable with me because I was Tim’s room-mate.’ Not that the bland blonde had spent any time with her.

  ‘Tim, yeah. Tim.’ The pause was so long that Dulcie checked her phone. Still connected. Down the bar, a stool opened up and she slid into it. She was facing the high shelf, but when she looked up the little bowl with the Siamese fighting fish wasn’t there.

  ‘Nemo’s gone home.’ She spoke without thinking, but it served to get Bruce’s attention back.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The fish. They’ve been keeping a fish behind the counter at my local coffee place.’ Even though he’d been the one to drop the conversational ball, she felt embarrassed and talked more to cover it up. ‘One of those Siamese fighting fish? They named him Nemo.’ To herself, she murmured, ‘I hope he’s OK.’

  He hadn’t heard that. ‘I get it. That’s sweet,’ he said, his voice sounding warm again. ‘I’m sorry, Dulcie. I had wanted to talk to you about Tim, about our stupid friends. My so-called friends, that is.’

  Dulcie leaned over her pint glass, cradling the phone, and waited. Bruce had more promise than a surrogate pet fish. The silence dragged on. ‘Were you and Tim close?’ she asked him, finally.

  ‘Tim? No! I mean, at one point we were, but not by the end. What I wanted to ask you, though—’ As if on cue, the signal beeped. ‘Sorry, Dulcie, I’ve got to take this. Do you mind?’

  ‘Not at all.’ He couldn’t see that she was rolling her eyes. ‘Bye.’ She sipped her drink. Why should she suppose that life would ever change in her particular fishbowl?

  ‘Excuse me?’ She waved. The barista looked up, flustered. The frozen mocha machine seemed to be on the fritz. ‘What happened to the fish?’

  ‘Oh, Nemo?’ Dulcie nodded as the barista got the blender-like contraption working. With a roar, it filled two large cups to go in quick succession. ‘Yeah, Ringo had to take him home. He was freaking out.’

  Dulcie thought of the last time she’d been in here. The little fish had been on full alert then, his red dorsal fin erect. ‘What was it? The noise? The air-conditioning?’

  ‘Who knows?’ The barista shrugged and reached to clear an empty. ‘It all started when this one chick was in here – dark-haired girl, cute. But Nemo didn’t like her. He was ramming against the bowl so hard, we all thought he was sushi.’

  Eleven

  After her last few social interactions, an evening out was not high on Dulcie’s list of priorities. Still, she found herself scrambling for excuses when Trista reached her at home later. She and Trista had been undergrads together, bonding over ‘Introduction to Anglo-Saxon’, which was difficult at any hour but particularly at eight a.m. Trista, too, was in the throes of a thesis, though at least she had started writing. Yes, she’d heard about Tim. All the more reason, said the voice on the phone, for them all to blow off some steam. Take a little time. Have a few beers. These were her friends, not Tim’s, but still it sounded a little too much like Alana’s party for Dulcie to warm to the idea.

  ‘I can’t,’ said Dulcie finally. ‘I’ve got some reading I’ve been putting off for days, and I’m just wiped.’ It was partly a lie, but even as Dulcie said it, she had a thought. ‘I’m re-examining a novel fragment. There might be something in the setting I can work with, pathetic fallacy and all that.’

  Trista groaned. With her bleached blonde shag, she might look post-modern, but academically, the tiny scholar was all Victorian – and by then readers had stopped searching for emotional cues in the landscape. ‘OK, weatherbird, I’ll leave you to your dramatic fogs and whatnot. But if you change your mind, we’ll be at the People’s Republik.’ The Cambridgeport pub was one of the few that still sold discounted pitchers, making it a prime grad student hang. ‘Speaking of emotional peaks and valleys, you know we all miss you.’

  Dulcie sighed. What with all that had happened, she barely felt a part of the grad school gang anymore. How could she concentrate with what had happened to Tim? But if she didn’t, she’d lose her grant and be out by the New Year.

  ‘I don’t know, Tris. I’ll try and come, if I can get some work done.’ Somewhere behind Trista, she could hear her petite colleague’s boyfriend beginning to chant: ‘One of us! One of us! One of us!’ She caught the reference – Freaks, 1932 – but, for a change, the film reference made her smile. Maybe she was getting over Jonah finally. ‘Better go feed Jerry, Tris. Sounds like he’s getting restless.’

  ‘OK, Dulcie. But I hope to see you later. And, either way, remember – softball tomorrow at one.’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘Don’t say it, kid. We’re all nerds, remember? We can take turns in the outfield.’

  Cheered by the brief interaction, Dulcie returned to her computer with mor
e energy than she’d felt thus far. She wouldn’t be lying if she actually did some research. A few keystrokes and she was back into a file she’d abandoned weeks before, a survey of critical papers on one of the most popular Gothics, The Italian. That novel was rife with the kind of imagery she and Trista had been talking about. Too much so, really. If Dulcie had to read one more reference to ‘tumultuous skies’ or a veil as a metaphor for concealment of just about anything, she’d be sick. Maybe that explained the appeal of The Ravages. For all its supernatural elements and improbable plot points – didn’t readers know right from the start that Hermetria would eventually regain her wealth? – it was, in some ways, underwritten. Well, maybe not Demetria’s overwrought speeches. But those weren’t what drew her, were they?

  Dulcie closed the file and turned her mind to more contemporary concerns. She’d promised to look for phantom files on her computer. What Stacia had said had rung true; Tim had no sense of personal boundaries. Even though his sleek laptop was years younger and more powerful than her little budget system, if his was busy downloading some pirated Hong Kong flick, he’d have had no qualms about invading her space. She could easily picture him barging into her room – and her cyberspace. The idea that he might have done more than use her system; that he might have left something on her computer, like the dishes he routinely left on the table – or the rug – was both aggravating and vaguely creepy. The ghost of sleazy presence, she thought.

  But where would such a file be? She’d flipped open her little laptop half an hour ago, and had already run a couple of ‘find’ functions, searching for anything under the name ‘Alana’, ‘nude’, and ‘hot’. When Trista had called she’d been browsing through the various photos in her computer, mostly opening up file after file of Mr Grey. God, she’d forgotten how cute he was, the way his green eyes seemed to see right into you. He could play the clown as well. She’d found several of the grey cat with his head twisted upside down, white chin up and wide ears flattened out on the carpet. ‘Yes, you look the same from this angle,’ he appeared to be saying. ‘You’re still my Dulcie, always will be.’

  Truth was, she’d spent so much time with those photos, she could have gone down to the bar with Trista and had a beer. But it had been a day. Maybe she’d reconsider the softball game tomorrow. For now, she’d move on past the cat photos. Stacia had said that whatever Tim had gotten was embarrassing, but that didn’t mean it was a photo. She opened up her documents file, and was pleased to recognize all the labels; nothing untoward here. She went down the list, looking at stuff dated six months ago, a year. ‘Smollett notes’. Now, why hadn’t she done her thesis on the earlier, humorous writer? She opened the file and started reading: ‘Narrative experiments, the beginning of character-driven fiction’.

  That started her thinking. Unlike her attendant Demetria, Hermetria was a great character. Even alone and broke she spoke her mind, standing up to the nobleman who came to woo her and to the various villains – the evil monk and that ambiguous ghost – who braved her mountain home. And she did it all with just one sketchily drawn sidekick.

  Maybe it was time to take a larger perspective – the role of the heroine and all that. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women had been published in 1792, a year or two before The Ravages of Umbria. Was the unknown author of The Ravages making a statement about women helping women? Someone had written about all of this, she vaguely recalled, and dug around till she found it. But the paper, written by a doctoral candidate in California, failed to ignite Dulcie’s own feelings of sisterhood.

  ‘How could someone write about sexual imagery and be so dull?’ Dulcie skimmed a few pages: characterization and the questioning of noble traits. She shook her head; maybe she was just a jealous spirit. If she’d written on this topic . . . well, if she had, she’d be halfway through her thesis, with no more worries about time – or money – running out. But maybe there’d be a loose end that Dulcie could grab on to; a stray thought that would unravel, giving Dulcie enough yarn to knit her own thesis – a study of the relationship between Hermetria and Demetria, for example. After her eyes had started to close for the fourth time she was ready to call it quits.

  ‘Enough,’ Dulcie muttered. If this kept up, she’d be seeing the weather as a manifestation of her own mood. With another shake of her curls to wake herself up, she maneuvered the mouse. A bigger page would be easier to read. But just as she clicked down to grab it, something else caught her eye: a file, right by the edge of the desktop, almost buried beneath the icon for the trash.

  Dulcie clicked on it and waited for it to open. Was this going to be something from Tim; a compromising photo of Alana or some heavy-metal blog post? Or was it something she herself had meant to discard? Just as in life, sometimes one didn’t hit the basket. But no, it was another picture of Mr Grey, and a glorious one at that. As the pixels resolved, she saw him as he’d been in his prime, posed as if for a formal portrait, sitting up and staring straight at the camera. His silver-grey ruff looked freshly brushed, his long whiskers spread wide. Between the alert, upright pose of his ears and the intense stare of his green eyes, the cat appeared to be staring straight at Dulcie; willing her to concentrate.

  ‘How could I have meant to trash this?’ She clicked to enlarge. With no room-mate around to make fun of her, she could make this her screen saver; a portrait to remember. But what could that stare be trying to tell her? She shook off the fancy, and was struck by another: what else was poking around the edges of her desktop?

  Although the portrait now filled most of her screen, she wiggled the cursor underneath it, next to the trash and the icon that linked her through to the university library. Yes, there was another file. She clicked twice and suddenly her screen flashed. Blank – and then, as she held her breath in a moment’s agony – on again. She let herself breathe again, and then bit her lip. Had anything been lost?

  This was a corrupted file. It was damaged somehow, or improperly stored – she’d dealt with those often enough to recognize the garbled icons at its top. If Tim had put it there, he’d probably not bothered to look to see if her aging computer could handle it, or even if her small share of software had the right tools to make it work. She scrolled down its margin. It was some kind of a spreadsheet; once the initial nonsense coding was past, its page split into neat little boxes. Two pages in, she was ready to give up. Whatever the file had held originally, it was worthless now.

  Then she saw something, far over on the right. Dulcie shifted the margin and there was a series of numbers. They looked like phone numbers, although some had extra digits. If Tim had been selling drugs, maybe he’d been more organized about his business than he had been about his personal life. But no, if these were phone numbers, the area codes were wrong. He couldn’t have been selling to 718, could he? Or 919. Wasn’t that in North Carolina? Several more columns stretched to the right. Some were blank, but most had been filled out with long strings of numbers and letters. Tim had been taking statistics. Could this be a project? A homework assignment that Luisa had given him, and that they had shared – here, in her room?

  The thought repulsed her. That pretty young woman and – Tim. She turned and looked at her bed. Ick. Swinging back around, she went to close the file. But she must have been moving, the swing of her chair carrying over to her right hand, because whatever she had clicked – something wasn’t right. Instead of that one file closing, everything flashed again, blank, and then back on. But this time, the desktop looked different.

  ‘Hell, hell, hell.’ The enlarged portrait of Mr Grey was gone. ‘What’d I do?’

  She found the oddly named file and clicked on it. ‘ERROR’, the screen read. ‘CORRUPTED FILE/UNABLE TO OPEN’.

  ‘I know it’s corrupted,’ she yelled at the screen as she clicked again. The same message flashed before her. ‘But you opened before . . . Come on!’ She had started talking to machinery; Dulcie knew she was losing it.

  ‘Calm down, girl.’ She sat back, put h
er hands in her lap. Tim’s old file – if that’s what it was – was no loss. But could she somehow salvage that lovely portrait of Mr Grey? Dulcie had been working on her old iBook long enough to know its quirks. Picking up the mouse again, she started sliding the cursor around the edges of her desktop.

  Something flashed. There! Tentatively, she dragged the icon out from behind the trash. It looked like the cat jpeg. She realized she was holding her breath as she clicked it open.

  ‘Damn!’ What had only minutes before been a glorious photo was now – another spreadsheet. Somehow, that accursed corrupted file had gotten into the only other file she’d had open on her desktop. ‘Damn, damn, damn. Damn you, Tim.’ A flash of guilt ran through Dulcie as she remembered how, in fact, Tim had come to his end. But if he’d been fooling around on her computer, if he was responsible for her losing material – losing a gorgeous photo of Mr Grey in particular – almost, almost he deserved it.

  ‘Bother.’ Dulcie was feeling a little embarrassed now. Maybe she was overattached to her late pet. Still . . . she scrolled down through the file. How could that beautiful image be gone? Her cursor was flying but all she was seeing were those little rectangular boxes, waiting for data. Three, maybe four pages in, some gibberish started to show up and she slowed her search. Maybe, somewhere in here, she’d find a version of that image.

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